A Single Moment
by Rata
Summary: It takes only a single moment to end a life.


DISCLAIMER: I don´t own them, not mine, you know the drill.  
  
AUTHOR´S NOTE: This is something that I wrote all at once and it comes from just having lost someone. As always, comments good and bad are welcome, but I would just like to point out it´s not supposed to be so much about the story but about the feeling so you know, just bare with me.  
  
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It had been an awful mess, blood everywhere, the smell of gunpowder clinging to everything it could. For a while there was even confusion as to who was actually shot and who had simply been bleed on. The final count had been two dead and one injured, all the rest had come away with only scrapes and bruises. None of that mattered now, because the only important thing was that one injured person.  
Goren was leaning against the door frame, unmoving and blocking the entrance to the little hospital room. He had been there for nearly three hours already, he hadn´t eaten in nearly a day and he was covered in blood. None of it mattered to him. He felt nothing. He was lost. All he could do was stand there, leaning against the door frame and stare at the unmoving figure lying on the bed. For a fleeting second he thought it might have been better if she had just died, instead of getting to cling on to life artificially for years to come.  
He was examining the figure closely, trying to remember every single detail. Her light brown hair was cut short, but not too short; she had brown eyes that could kill if she wanted to; she had been short, but with so much energy that it made it impossible to ignore her. She had also been a cop, a good one too. He looked at her now, pale and with tubes and machines connected to her. A machine beeped, keeping her heart beating, he found this noise intrusive, like a nosy neighbor who has no right to eavesdrop. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, he knew he was tired and yet he didn´t feel it.  
He had only just opened his eyes when he was approached. Whoever it was stood close to him and said nothing. It took him a moment to realize this. He turned his eyes to see who it was, he turned to face the person when he realized it was his partner standing next to him. She was just staring at the girl lying on the bed, and when she spoke she sounded far away.  
  
"They´ve contacted her family. Her father will be here in the morning."  
  
He looked back at the bed briefly before turning back to his partner. She turned to him too. Her lip was cut and the cut above her right eyebrow had been taken care off. Goren wondered if he looked as worn out as she did. He must´ve, because Eames suddenly seemed overly concerned about him. She looked down and caught sight of his hands, "You should have that taken care off." She said. Goren looked down. She was right, his left hand was badly cut, it had stopped bleeding but he did need to clean it up. He nodded his head once. Without another word he turned and walked down the hall to find a nurse. Eames hung back for a few seconds, she saw the girl on the bed and all she could feel was numbness and all she could think about were the day´s events. She turned and followed her partner, she didn´t know what else to do. She felt lost.  
  
It seemed to Eames it took her the same amount of time to go down the hallway as it took her to get through the next week. Reports had to be completed, forms filed out and statements repeated over and over again. It all seemed like a distant memory, or maybe something she´d read in a book once. She still couldn´t bring herself to believe what had happened. She had fallen into a zombie-like state that she only tried to shake off in the presence of her partner and her boss. That morning had been the worst one yet, all because of one little phone call. It had been early, close to seven when her phone rang, she hadn´t slept well for days and so she answered on the second ring. The person on the other side was the father of the girl, her condition was still the same, but it seemed life had decided to play a little joke on them all: the girl had a friend who had been in a coma, he´d woken up that morning, after being out for nearly eight years. Eames had already known about it, the girl had told her, it was the reason she´d become a cop. It all seemed surreal, and Eames expected to be rudely woken up by the alarm clock any moment now. The alarm never came.  
  
Goren wasn´t doing any better. He was hiding behind his work even more than usual. He didn´t make any conversation with anyone except his partner and his boss, and even that was only about the new case they were assigned to. He not only felt like an injustice had been committed by life, he felt responsible as well, he had been, after all, the man who´d suggested the girl go undercover. The letters on the file he was reading started blurring for the tenth time in as many minutes. He couldn´t concentrate, especially since he´d gotten that phone call from Eames. It had been a little after seven, he had been awake since before four in the morning. The girl´s friend, her reason for becoming a cop, was out of his coma. Goren leaned back on his chair and looked up at the ceiling, wondering if there really was someone with a sick sense of humor behind all of this.  
  
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A WEEK BEFORE.  
  
It had started out like any other week. Tons upon tons of paperwork and a single case which was gruesome and difficult. It was only ten in the morning and Goren and Eames had already been out trying to track down a witness for the past two hours. They hadn´t succeeded. Now they found themselves sitting at their desks, waiting for a phone call from the suspect´s lawyer and with nothing to do but fill out paperwork. Eames, of course, was bent over her desk getting through it all, Goren was staring into space, thinking about the case. It was just another ordinary day.  
  
The elevator doors had suddenly swung open and a young girl stepped out. Goren saw her get off the elevator and thought maybe she´d gotten off at the wrong floor. She bit her lower lip nervously and looked around, as if looking for someone. Not too sure of herself, she started walking. She passed Goren and Eames´ desks and kept going, right to the door to Deakins´ office. Goren found this very curious, the girl could be no older than eighteen or nineteen, she wore jeans that seemed too long for her and were already torn at the bottom from being dragged. Her tennis shoes were no better off, they looked ancient and as if it was time to retire them. She wore a simple black t-shirt underneath a grey sweater that was also too big for her. A backpack was swung over her right shoulder and she wore headphones, noise came from them and the cable coiled down to her waist and into the backpack. She turned to look at Goren for a second before knocking on the door. Deakins raised his head from his desk and signaled for her to come in. She did so, immediately pulling down the headphones and sitting down. She handed a file to Deakins´ and he quickly read through it.  
  
Goren wondered who the girl was and why she was there. Maybe she was delivering something, but why would she sit down to watch Deakins read the file? He would of kept on wondering, except his phone rang. He answered, it was the suspect´s lawyer, he was claiming police harassment and so would only come in if arrested or if a warrant was presented to his lawyer. Goren hung up, it was just another ordinary day. He went back to his paperwork, not bothering to tell Eames what the phone call was about, she had probably already figured it out. It was a half an hour later that Deakins came out of his office and approached the detectives.  
  
He told them about a new case. It seemed someone was responsible for five separate murders committed in the last two months. All five of them occurred in different ways, different people, different parts of town, there seemed nothing in common between them except the extraordinary amount of violence used. One was a beating done with a chair leg, another was a man thrown out of a roof after having his legs broken, the third was a woman shot thirteen times in the head, the fourth a person run over three times with some sort of SUV and the fifth, committed just a few days earlier, was a man who was drowned in his pool, after being tied down to a hundred pound weight and thrown in. Since the murders had all been connected, it was assumed that it was someone being paid to kill these people, it was the beginning of a business. Deakins assigned this case to Goren and Eames and told them to drop everything else, this was their top priority.  
  
Both Goren and Eames were more than a bit surprised at this. It was a very unusual move to have two detectives cut off all their work to concentrate on a single case. Before they could object, their boss offered and explanation. It was because of the girl, she was the genius profiler who had just started working for the NYPD. They needed no further explanation, everyone in the department had heard about the genius girl already. She was only 25 years old and already had six years experience inside several police departments. She had finished high school at fifteen, college at eighteen. She´d been educated by a very prestigious school for gifted children in New York. On top of that, she was actually good at her job. She had spent her first four years working for the CSU in Washington D.C., then she´d transferred and started profiling. Three months ago she´d been re assigned to New York City and every department within every law agency wanted her. As a profiler she´d already handled fifteen cases, and she hadn´t been wrong in any of them yet. She´d connected these murders, and she was assigned to work on them now with the Major Case Squad.  
  
Eames looked skeptic, but Goren jumped at the chance to work with the girl. He´d heard about it just like any other cop, but he´d actually done a little research on the girl, it really was amazing what she´d accomplished and it wasn´t every day that you got to work side by side by a real life genius. Eames argued that point, reminding Goren of his profiling and knowledge absorbing abilities, but Goren insisted that this girl knew more about profiling at 25 than most retired profilers they would ever meet. The argument continued as they got up from their desks and headed towards Deakins office.  
  
The girl was pacing the office, looking around, taking everything in. Deakins came in first, followed by Eames and Goren. She stopped the moment both detectives were in the room. She looked at them, in fact she just plain stared. She didn´t shake hands with them but introduced herself. She was full of energy, as soon as the introductions were done, she started pacing again. She simply started talking. She brought Eames and Goren up to speed without any of them having to open the case file. She only stopped talking when she was done, but she didn´t stop pacing. Her hair fell just above her shoulders and seemed to move a fraction of a second after her, giving the appearance of an indecisive child.  
  
Goren had been following every single one of the girl´s movements and when she stopped talking it took him a moment to realize it. As soon as he did he looked away and opened the case file. He read through it quickly, he didn´t look back up and he started trying to poke holes into the girl´s theory. She in turn, didn´t stop pacing, didn´t look at Goren and had an answer for every one of his questions. She really didn´t seem to have of missed anything. Eames was impressed and amused, it wasn´t every day someone had a comeback to every single one of her parter´s comments, questions and insights. Neither of them seemed ready to give in to the other so it was Deakins who actually stopped them. He told Goren it was clear the girl´s theory was solid, even though a little far fetched; he told the girl to listen to Goren, he could pick up things too. The argument was settled and they were all dismissed so they could get to work right away.  
  
Eames felt a little bit like an outsider, she wasn´t the world´s greatest profiler and she wasn´t full of unusual, strange and little known facts about every single subject known to man. She decided to leave both the girl and Goren to their quarrelling, she took the case file and started building up the girl´s theory. According to her, every single one of the victims was killed by means of the previous one´s hobby. It checked out, victim 1 must´ve been linked to the killer´s hobby, 2 was thrown off a roof, victim 1 liked parachuting. Victim 2 liked hunting and carried a .22 for shooting clay pigeons, victim 3 was killed with a .22. Victim 4 was run over by an SUV, and victim 3 liked model cars, the most recent one she´d bought was the model of the first SUV ever built. Finally, victim 5 was weighed down and drowned, victim 4 had been a very enthusiastic diver. It was a long shot, but it was just plausible enough to be believable. The girl had also managed to track down a single individual who had been in contact with all five victims, the suspect, although nothing was actually known about him yet.  
  
The fact that the suspect was a man, about six feet high and weighing anywhere between 150 and 170 lbs, was based mostly on the third victim. She had been shot thirteen times in the head in her own home, but police found footprints not belonging to anyone she had seen in the last week and a DNA sample that was taken from saliva found on the victim´s body. After testing the DNA it was concluded it belonged to a man who was not on record and who was not a relative. Every other man who´d been in contact prior to her death was tested, it didn´t belong to any of them so it belonged to the killer. This was a very personal murder, he´d actually taken the time to spit on the victim. The girl was convinced this murder was the one which would lead them to the killer.  
  
The connection between the rest of the victims to this man was a little more shaky. She´d managed to get statements from eye witnesses who claimed that a man, about six feet tall and maybe about 160lbs had been seen following and/or close to all of the victims. This could just be a coincidence, but it was, again, just plausible enough to be believable. Eames decided to be practical and just assume everything the girl had concluded was right, everything was circumstancial, all they needed to do was find some evidence. She went back to the file and looked over every single murder, there had to be something there. After another half an hour she decided that the DNA sample was the best way to go, but there wasn´t much that could be done with it. It was at this moment that she looked up and decided to bring in her partner.  
  
Goren was still arguing with the girl, trying to make her theory collapse, the girl was still answering everything he said and was making it very difficult for Goren. Eames cleared her throat, it took a second to work, but Goren did finally stop arguing and turned to his partner. Eames told him quickly about how it might just be possible the theory was correct, but that it was all circumstancial and she had found nothing so far that could be a lead or solid proof of anything. Goren took the file and almost instantly said that the DNA would be the best way to go. He started studying the test results on it, there was nothing very unusual in it. It was a man, but there seemed to be nothing outstanding over his saliva. There were traces of chocolate and coffee, which wasn´t anything so unusual as to send up any red flags. Eames was thinking maybe it was a lost cause when Goren jerked his head up.  
  
"Coffee." He said, "there were traces of caffeine in the saliva. He drank coffee."  
  
The girl quickly shot back, "Yeah, but caffeine by itself isn´t anything special, there would be no difference in it from one brand to another."  
  
This time Goren had won the argument, he turned to the girl, "Not caffeine, the aminoacid complex in coffee..it differs from brand to brand..."  
  
"And if you´re suddenly into the killing business your paycheck is considerably larger than before, moving up from crappy coffee to greener pastures would be one of the first things I´d do." Eames finished Goren´s thought. The girl smiled and nodded enthusiastically. They were right. She picked up Eames´ phone without asking and called the CSU and asked them to analyze the saliva and identify the aminoacids found in the coffee. She hung up and started rocking on her heels, Eames thought for a second she would explode out of sheer emotion. She couldn´t help but stare, the girl caught this and stopped suddenly, she started biting her lower lip instead.  
  
Goren thought it was slightly amusing. He could argue with this girl and he could compete with her against all her restlessness and mannerisms, but it was a whole other thing from were Eames was sitting. Eames didn´t participate, she had to stand it and try to make sense of it. Goren thought it commendable that his partner had as much patience as she did, but he didn´t really think she had enough patience for two people. The fact that she´d gotten to her desk and started working, ignoring the discussions around her, was a sign that she saw no point in trying to participate and, Goren assumed, that she didn´t really want to listen to them. The looks her partner was shooting at the girl were priceless now, she was obviously not completely annoyed, more amazed, but she wouldn´t stay amazed for long. The girl seemed very aware of all her surroundings, she didn´t miss a thing, but it was obvious that sometimes she forgot were she was and just started letting everything out. Goren knew what this was like, and was sympathetic. Goren´s musings were violently cut short when the girl turned to look at the clock over the far wall.  
  
"Oh shit! Is that the time?" She looked down at her own watch for confirmation. When she realized it was the time she quickly turned to both detective, "I gotta go. Sorry...I´ll be back later, just gimme...a couple of hours." With that she took off to the elevators.  
  
Eames was not ready to just let her bounce out of there, she called after her, "Hey, what about the case?"  
  
The girl turned around while pushing the -down- button for the elevator, "Uhm...hey well I will be back I just gotta go..I promised.." the elevator doors swung open, she stepped inside but had hardly done so when she stepped back out, "well if you don´t mind you can come with me. It´ll just be really quick." She held back for a second before stepping back in the elevator. Goren shared a look with his partner and they both got up from their desks.  
  
It turned out the girl had promised to stop by her old school, St. Joseph´s School for Gifted Children. It had been her home since she was ten until she was fifteen. She hadn´t been back in New York for six months and she´d promised she´d visit some friends. Eames regretted coming along as soon as she found out where they were going, Goren was only more curious about this girl. From what he´d heard, mostly these kids ended up hating their old schools, they isolate them from the rest of the world and make them stand out even more than they already would normally. He mentioned this to the girl, she shrugged her shoulders and said that it wasn´t the school, it was people in there that she had an interest in. She quickly mentioned that she was put in there when she was ten after her mother suddenly died, and that she did, in fact, hate the school, but she figured that if she denied it now that she was out, then the situation would never change.  
  
A few minutes later, she pulled over at the front of the school. She got out and without even waiting for the other two, she went inside. Goren noticed she took down a paper bag, he was wondering what exactly was inside the bag when a red haired girl came running towards them. Goren stopped and hung back, children sometimes made him nervous. He breathed a sigh of relief that Eames didn´t miss when the red haired girl ignored them.  
  
"Hi Terry! You came! Sister Mary Margaret said you´d never come ´cause you always break your promises and you´re a very keen liar."  
  
Terry hugged the red-hair and turned to the detectives, "You can see why I just hate this place." She smiled down at the girl and without saying anything else, she simply took out three Stephen King novels and handed them to the girl. She squealed happily and ran off into the building, probably to hide the books from whoever Sister Mary Margaret was. The three of them started toward the building but where stopped before reaching it, this time, however, it was an adult. Goren still stiffened up a little as he saw who it was, it was a nun, a very scary looking nun. She was slightly hunched over and her face reflected her years, her eyes were blue and cold. When she spoke, disdain dripped from every word.  
  
"You came. And I thought it would be a good and calm day." Terry laughed and shook her head, "Sister Mary Margaret, I wouldn´t dream of letting you live out your days in the good grace of the lord without actually working for it.", she started walking again, just as she was on the first steps of the building she turned back to the nun, "Oh and Sister Mary Margaret..you shouldn´t lie. It´ll earn you hell and a nice cozy room next to me in the afterlife." The nun stayed silent but eyed them. Eames felt a little intimidated, but Terry didn´t really seem to notice. She went inside and turned left, knocked on the door at the end of the hall and went in.  
  
The nun inside the office looked completely different than the one outside. She had kind eyes and smiled fondly at all three of them. She hugged Terry and shook hands with Eames and Goren, paying close attention to their names and occupations. Terry smiled at the old woman, it was a long time before anyone spoke. The first one to do so was Terry.  
  
"I brought you something, just be sure to hide if from Sister Nasty out there." She haphazardly pointed out the window were Sister Mary Margaret was looking inside, still eyeing them. She put her hand inside the paper bag and pulled out a couple of tabloid magazines. The nun seemed beside herself with joy, she looked through them excitedly, and only stopped when she caught the detective´s looks. She smiled and put them down, explaining that they were quite amusing as long as you didn´t take them too seriously.  
  
The rest of the visit was just as surreal as the arrival. Terry took them on a grand tour of the facility, interrupting several classes along the way and being stopped by a number of other children. She always had something to hand out to them, some modeling clay, markers, coloring books, even a couple of cd´s. For the entire time, both detectives were completely baffled. It was only when they were heading back out that Terry took the time to explain.  
  
"I have a standing arrangement with the reverend mother. She believes that geniuses are still people and shouldn´t really be caged up like they are. She lets me bring them things to make their lives a little bit less educational and a little bit more fun."  
  
"Well why didn´t you just become a teacher then? Try to really change their lives, not just give them a few things and think that´ll do."  
  
She shrugged at Eames question, but Goren noticed her eyes suddenly looked very different, very sad and angry. She stopped and looked back at the building, she suddenly seemed very serious, all the incontrollable energy she´d irradiated was just gone. Both detectives suddenly realized that it was a very personal subject, one that would be carefully avoided in the future. It was the first time since they met that Eames suddenly saw her as a real human being, not just an excentric character. This sudden change in personality lasted only a second, she shrugged again and walked back to the car. The next time she spoke she was energetic and it seemed as if nothing had happened.  
  
Now that she was done with other business, she focused completely on the case. It was all she talked about on the drive back, on the ride up on the elevator, on the way to their desks and for the rest of the afternoon. It was close to six the next time any of them noticed the time. Goren and Eames were exhausted by then, this girl did not stop for anything. They´d been trying to track down some evidence, the results had come back from the lab already and they had identified the kind of coffee. It was very expensive and only sold in two stores in New York City. They´d already called the stores and there was only one person who matched their description, it was, of all people, one of the workers. They´d made no other progress so far. It was looking hopeless when suddenly Terry had another brilliant idea. She suddenly stood up and began pacing, Eames was to tired to care what she did and Goren was still trying to connect he dots, they both half listened to the girl.  
  
She thought she found something in victim number five. The man was behind in alimony and welfare payments. She suddenly started thinking that maybe the killer picked out the victims, or maybe people went to him when they had problems like that. She was suddenly convinced the killer only went after people who, in his eyes, had wronged someone else. A quick background check on the other four victims began to confirm the theory. All the victims had some sort of problem which affected another person, affairs, alimony and neglect. Eames was still very skeptic but Terry finally convinced them to at least find out more about the employee they´d found out about.  
  
It was another hour and they learned that he was apparently the perfect gentleman. He always helped, was always courteous, never late and very respectful. Eames suddenly got the feeling that this guy was too good to be true. Her suspicions suddenly were confirmed, when they started calling his neighbors and they started hinting that he was also known for being able to fix certain problems. None of the neighbors believed he was capable of murder, but more than one said that he had helped out with bothersome people, one woman even said that he´d beat up a guy once because he had been cheating on his wife. They were rumors, but they were rumors that seemed to make Terry´s theory more and more solid by the minute.  
  
They reported their progress to Deakins and were about to call it a night when Terry suddenly got another idea. She wanted to go after the guy right then. She called the store and found out everyone was gone by eight o´clock, she looked at her watch, it was seven thirty. She wanted to find the guy and question him. Both Goren and Eames objected loudly to this, but in the end Terry simply went over their heads and somehow convinced Deakins to let her do it. Once that was settled, Goren thought it would be better if she went undercover, if he was the person the person they were looking for they could maybe get enough to get a warrant, if not, then they could move on. Both detectives made another attempt to convince the girl to try it the next day but she wouldn´t hear of it. She seemed hell-bent on making it all happen that night., they reluctantly agreed when she threatened she would do it with or without their help.  
  
By eigth twenty pm they were parked outside the employee´s apartment building. His name was John Russell, he was 35 and had lived in that same building for the last ten years. They figured that if he left the store at eight, he would be home anywhere between eight thirty and nine. Since they were doing something like a makeshift undercover, Terry had already changed clothes. She wore a skirt and a blouse, it made her look a few years older. They´d bought a bottle of scotch on the way over and she´d taken three big gulps and spit out the fourth one. She´d put make up on and made it run so it looked as if she´d been crying. She really did look like she had suffered by the time she was done. She got out of the car and sat at the steps of the building. It was a cold night and she started shivering almost immediately. Russell showed up about ten minutes after she first sat down. He got off the bus at the corner and started walking slowly towards the building. Terry took a deep breath and suddenly spoke into the microphone attached to her.  
  
"I did want to be a teacher. All my life it´s all I wanted..I had a friend, Mike, he was my neighbor and we went to the same school ´till I started at St. Joe´s, he use to visit me...when I went to college, he´d tell people I was his cousin from outta town when I skipped class and went with him to school. He made me feel normal..." She took a deep breath, her voice was shaking, Goren almost told her to forget what she was doing and just let it go, "He was shot when he we were 17, in a hold up in a store. When I finished school I found myself being chased down my law enforcement agencies all over the country so I just accepted and left..that´s why I´m not a teacher detective. I can´t be..not now, not anymore. He didn´t even die you know, he´s just lying there in a coma, nothing wrong with him, just won´t wake up..I lost all hope years ago. I just try to focus on what I´m doing and be done with it, I don´t care much for the rest of the world." Russell was just on the first step when she finished speaking. It was at that moment that they all realized what a big mistake this had been, but it was too late to do anything about it.  
  
Russell took one look at Terry and got her inside the building. She made up a story about her boyfriend cheating on her several times and then running off when he found out she was pregnant. She sounded very convincing and Russell bought it all. He gave her some clothes to change into and offered her dinner. Terry was just done with it when he offered to help her, told her that he could help change her boyfriend´s mind. He said he could help him understand the importance of responsibility and that if he didn´t want to accept it then he could make sure she was never bothered again by him. Goren´s blood froze when he heard this, this man was just simply offering to murder someone without the slightest compunction or objection. Terry also suddenly felt terrified, she thanked Russell and promised to go by the shop the next morning to work things out, she did her best to sound truly thankful and as if she hadn´t understood Russell´s intentions. It worked out fine and he saw her off close to eleven thirty pm.  
  
After she was picked up, no one said anything to her. It had been to tense a situation and a billion things could of gone wrong. Goren regretted ever agreeing to this and was content with just dropping off the girl and going back home. The next morning he was at the office early, trying to come up with some sort of justifiable explanation as to why this girl needed to be taken off the case. As soon as Deakins walked in the door he talked to him, but his complaints fell on deaf ears. Deakins didn´t agree with the girl either, but he had been ordered to let her work freely and orders were orders. Goren went back to his desk, he didn´t like the situation, he got the sense that Terry was too unstable to be working something like undercover. He remembered the sound of her voice as she´d told them about Mike, she was on the breaking point, Goren could tell. Eames walked in perfectly on time and it only took one look from Goren to tell her that he´d already tried to stop the investigation, and failed. Terry showed up about a half hour later, she ignored Goren´s objections and said they just needed to get to the shop. At least this time she agreed to have Goren come with her, Eames would stay outside and there would be plenty of back up in case it was needed. They arrived at the store a little after eleven am. Both Terry and Goren were wearing bullet proof vests and were instructed to not let the situation get out of hand. All they were there for was to get evidence, not make any arrests. Goren went into the store first, and pretended to be looking around, Terry came in two minutes after Goren. Eames sat outside, she was nervous, it was something that was thrown together in just a few hours, the chances of things getting very wrong very quickly were way to high for her liking.  
  
At first, however, it all went fine. Russell saw Terry and took her to a room in the back. He explained to her about what he could do and that it wouldn´t even be that costly. Eames was surprised, he showed no regret over these things, he even plain and simply said he would be glad to kill the man who had mistreated Terry. The girl, for her part, tried not to look to shocked and seemed to pull it off well enough to convince Russell. She started asking him about what he did and details, trying not to sound too desperate to get criminal information out of him. Outside, Goren kept pacing the store back and forth, he was getting restless, it was taking too long.  
  
Goren´s nerves were almost too much to bear. He wasn´t so much nervous about everything going wrong, but about Terry herself. Ever since her confession last night he realized that this girl didn´t even really know if she wanted to be were she was. Goren had spent most of the night imagining what it must´ve been like, loosing you mother at ten, being put in a school you hated, separated from the rest of the world. He tried to picture what she must´ve felt when she lost her best friend, she had lost the one person that had made her feel normal, but this person wasn´t dead. It was as if he´d been thrown into oblivion, she´d said that morning when Goren tried to convince her to drop the investigation. Goren realized that he didn´t know this girl, and yet he cared about her, he cared because she´d been thrown out of the world and made an outcast and she´d managed to somehow survive. Outside, Eames would never tell her partner, but she felt exactly the same way he did.  
  
It seemed like hours had gone by when Terry finally came out. Russell looked overly pleased with himself and Terry seemed a little pale. She said goodbye and was almost to the door when the one thing that needed to go wrong for everything to go bad happened. A young man suddenly came into the store, gun in hand and pointed it at Terry. They had almost been clear, almost had the suspect and enough to make an arrest, and life sent in a robber. They were all taken aback, out of all the things that could of happened, they hadn´t considered this one.  
  
The man pushed Terry, and everyone else, to the back room where she´d just come from. Other than Goren, Terry and Russell, there was another woman, the cashier. The man with the gun made them stand facing the wall and started searching their pockets, by pure bad luck, he decided to start with Goren. He immediately found his badge, gun and the vest he was wearing. He was shocked back, but regained control of himself and moved on to Terry, he found all of her things as well. Russell was surprised to say the least, and he was angry. He pushed off the and started pacing the room like a caged animal.  
  
"You´re a cop, you bitch! You told me you were hurt, I would of seeked out justice for you! Don´t you get it? That´s my purpose in life, that´s what I do! Well..now I guess you´ll just have to see first hand what justice is all about." In one quick movement, he took the gun from the other man´s hands and shot him three times in the head. He turned around and pointed it at Terry and fired another two shots. At the same time Goren tried to reach for his gun, Russell noticed and fired at him. The bullet missed him, barely, it scraped past his hand. Russell was about to shoot again when a dozen cops filed into the room, Russell turned around and charged at the first person he saw, it was Eames. Shots from several guns, including Eames, went off at the same time, but Russell still managed to tackle her. He was almost passed out, but he managed to hit Eames over the eye with the gun, she started bleeding. Russell was forced off the detective and when he was released he was unconscious. Eames sat up and looked over at Goren, there was a cut over her eye and her lip was bleeding.  
  
Eames managed to stand and went to Russell and checked for a pulse, there barely was one, he was bleeding badly from at least five gun shot wounds. The man who´d tried to rob the store lay on the floor, his blood also seemed to fill the little room. Terry was sitting against the wall, blood pouring out of one wound. The vest had stopped one bullet, but the second one had caught her in the neck, right above the vest. She was bleeding badly and almost as soon as Goren reached her, she lost consciousness she´d been trying to say something, Goren never found out what it was. The cashier was hysterical and bloodstained. As soon as the EMS arrived, it took a minute to make it clear that the cashier was fine, Goren wasn´t hurt seriously, Eames´ cut wasn´t bad, Russell was dead, as was the man who´d tried to rob the store, and Terry was dying. She was rushed to the hospital and worked on for forty minutes, by the time the doctors got a steady pulse, it was too late. She was gone, all that remained was her body, being sustained by life support.  
  
Both detectives had also been taken to the hospital, but Goren wondered off to find the girl while his partner was being looked at. He managed to find the room she was in, as soon as he found her she stood at the door and didn´t move. It was three hours before Eames found him, she´d been looking for him but was stopped by the police, they wanted needed a statement. She gave it as quickly as she could but she kept being interrupted by the officers who only seemed concerned about the robbery. After over an hour, Eames simply cursed loud enough for the officers to hear and she walked away. It took her nearly another hour to find her partner. She recognized him as soon as she saw him leaning against the door frame. His hand had stopped bleeding and all the blood on his clothes had dried. It took him a while to even realize Eames was there.  
  
She was standing there at the door when it all hit her, hard. She looked at the girl on the bed, she´d been so full of life and energy, so ready to change the world or at least try her best to do some good. Eames realized she knew next to nothing about her, and the little time she´d spent with Terry she´d been mostly annoyed. She didn´t know what to think, she felt numb all over. She finally built enough courage to tell her partner to go get his hand looked at, he seemed lost, he simply did as he was told. Eames looked back at the girl one last time and followed her partner down the hall, it was all she could do.  
  
For the next week all they did was mostly give statements and fill out forms about what had happened. It seemed every single law enforcement agency in the country wanted an explanation as to how exactly the "girl- genius" had been killed. Goren had found it extremely tireing and unnerving, no one seemed to care this girl would never come back to life, that she would lie there in that hospital bed until someone decided to pull the plug. It only helped to make Goren linger on it even more, he suddenly felt disgusted, all everyone wanted to know was how such a brilliant mind had been lost, no one seemed to give a damn that a human being with feelings and hopes and dreams had actually been crushed in a single second. So many things had gone wrong, so many long shots seemed to have come together for the explicit purpose of destroying this one single life forever. It seemed cruelly fitting that Mike chose to come out of his coma a week after Terry was shot.  
  
As time went by the confusion and mixed feelings started to grow smaller and smaller. Every day it was a little easier to not think about it, it was easier to go back to work and everyday it seemed as if it had happened to someone else. Neither Goren nor Eames ever talked about it, but they both felt as if something inside of them had been deeply changed. They worked, day in, day out, eventually going back to their old rutine, joking and threatening suspects in ways only they could. There even came the day when they didn´t really remember the incident at all and it seemed to them that the world was right again.  
  
Days would turn into months and months into years. Time stopped would stop for no one and it would seem as if only a moment had gone by when, finally, fourteen years later, Terry gave up on artificial life and died. The funeral was small, only her father, her neighbor, a very old nun and a red haired girl would attend. They would look down at the grave and be at a loss for words, they would listen to the priest and not understand what he said. It took seemed to them a great injustice, it had taken Terry twenty five years to live out her life, fourteen years to finally die, and only a single moment in which the spark that was her was extinguished.  
  
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For Miss Tere: for six years you were an authority figure, for two a great teacher, and for fourteen years one of the voices which has pushed me to always be better. You cared for us all even when we´d left, you remembered us even when years passed between visits. You taught us grammar and math, but you gave us the tools to learn about life. You were my teacher and my friend, thank you. 


End file.
